Microsoft OneDrive

Clear interface. Clients for Mac, iOS, and Android, as well as Windows and Windows Phone. Can fetch any file from a PC. Web interface to all files and media. Excellent photo presentation with slideshows and tagging. Low cost.

Cons
No audio streaming/playing capability. No search in iOS and Android apps.

Bottom Line

With apps for more platforms than any of its competitors, OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) is the most flexible of any cloud service for storing, syncing, and sharing files.

Folder and File Syncing Forgetting about "devices" for a moment, OneDrive offers another desktop computer-centric function—file and folder syncing. This convenience is similar to what you get with Dropbox ($9.99 a month, 4 stars), Nomadesk ($50 a year, 3 stars), and SugarSync ($4.99 a month, 4.5 stars).

In the past, Microsoft had separated its syncing service with names like Live Mesh and Live Sync, and (way back) FolderShare. I for one, find the joining of online storage and syncing into one cloud service a refreshing simplification of a previously somewhat confusing set of systems. OneDrive syncing on computers differs from the earlier Mesh in that you can't designate any old folder you want to be synced, only those under the OneDrive main folder. But Microsoft has made it possible for these synced folders to look less sequestered in the OneDrive world, by using Windows' Libraries. It also adds a truly cool feature called Fetch—more about that in a moment.

The desktop clients for OneDrive syncing run on Windows Vista through Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.7.3 or later. They're quick to install, with a setup wizard that lets you create an account if you don't already have one. It then shows how your OneDrive folder will appear in Windows Explorer (or Finder), with its little blue cloud icon instead of the traditional yellow folder icon. Setup also places a cloud icon in your system tray, from which you can open your synced folder or change settings. You can change the folder's location from the default top level under your user folder.

When you place a photo, document, or other item in the created OneDrive folder, it magically appears in any of your other OneDrive clients on any of your other computers. You can even share a whole folder, but to co-edit documents in the online versions of Office applications you have to share individual files.

For a quick test, I went over to my Windows 8.1 PC and created a new folder in the OneDrive app, which appeared seconds later in a Windows 7 machine's OneDrive folder that I had set up. Including OneDrive in Windows Explorer is incredibly helpful because you can save work from any application to your cloud storage directly, without having to go to a website.

The Windows 8.1 OneDrive App As mentioned, OneDrive plays a big role for Windows 8, which ships with a OneDrive app that you can recognize by the cloud on its blue Start page tile. Clicking this tile takes you into another grid of tiles, each representing a folder or file you've stored on the service. Folders containing image files display one of the images on their tile above the folder name, and with a right-click (or swipe in from the top or bottom edge on a touch screen) you can view Details, such as the item's date and size.

The same applies if you're inside a folder. For example, if you're in an image folder, you'll by default just see large thumbnails of the images. Hovering over a tile or thumbnail displays the filename, date last modified, file size, and with whom it's shared. When you invoke the app bar from the main screen (by right-clicking or swiping up from the bottom of a touchscreen), you'll see just five buttons—Refresh, New Folder, Upload, Details, and Select all. These options change when you right click on a file tile, adding four new buttons on the left—Clear selection, Download, Delete, and Open with.

Happily, Windows 8.1 rectifies an inconvenience of Windows 8: OneDrive syncing is built into the desktop and the File Explorer. With 8, you had to install a utility just as if the desktop were Windows 7 itself.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael...

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